Born into a musical family that hosted touring artists from Ireland in their home, Aoife O’Donovan grew up surrounded by music. Her summers in Ireland were also crucial to her concept of music. She explains, “In Ireland, music is so much more a part of the culture than it is [in the States]. Everybody sings, everybody plays,” she says. “People just have an innate respect for music, poetry, artistry, and creativity. It’s such a beautiful culture.” She founded the bluegrass band Crooked Still while a student at the New England Conservatory of Music and worked with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bassist Edgar Meyer, mandolinist Chris Thile, and fiddler Stuart Duncan on the Grammy Award-winning “Goat Rodeo Sessions.” O’Donovan now has her own collection of critically acclaimed solo albums and a Grammy Award with I’m With Her, her folk music band with friends Sara Watkins (from the group Nickel Creek) and Sarah Jarosz.
In the middle of the pandemic, the Orlando Philharmonic asked O’Donovan to write a piece about woman’s sufferage. For inspiration, she read Elaine Weiss’s book, The Woman’s Hour, which details how suffragists fought for the 19th Amendment during a pandemic. Particularly inspiring was Carrie Chapman Catt, the National American Woman Suffrage Association president, who led a march to Tennessee to push for the final vote to ratify the amendment. A song cycle made up of five pieces, America, Come is based on Catt’s and President Woodrow Wilson’s passionate letters and speeches urging for women’s suffrage. The Orlando Philharmonic premiered the work in May 2021 in honor of the 101st anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
